The Sacred Combe

by Thomas Maloney

  ‘This is where we rope up,’ he said, shrugging off his rucksack and laying his slim fingers on the wall of rock that barred our way. ‘We’ll use running belays. Put on your harness and helmet and screw your courage to the sticking place.’

  We barely spoke a word to each other on the journey south. Corvin dashed off a few more notes and gazed out of the train window while I read my book — Borges — and relived the strange new euphoria of pleasure and fear I had experienced on the shattered side of a mountain.

  After a couple of hours in one particularly busy carriage, Corvin bumped my knee gently with his own. ‘I like trains,’ he declared in a level murmur without turning his head, as though we were birdwatchers in the presence of a rare flock. ‘But sometimes I lose the knack of them, and feel a silent rant against humanity rise up within me.’ He paused for a moment, perhaps checking that no one else had heard him, then continued in his low monotone: ‘‘‘Look at yourselves!” the rant says, “Reading your tawdry papers and thumbing your gadgets! Overwhelmed by cleverness and anxiety, good intentions and a terminal loss of imagination, fooled by sly convention, crippled by the woes of specialised competence and the joys of generalised ignorance, like circus animals when the crowds have lost interest. Come away, you silly oxen! The combe awaits you! There is no guard to bribe, no gate to keep the riff-raff out! Come away! Do not go gentle into that London Lite!’’’ He again fell silent for a few seconds. ‘Then I recover myself, open my senses, observe the ever-renewing gallery of expressions on preoccupied faces, notice a familiar book in an unlikely hand, catch a coded fragment of lovers’ talk or the friendly words exchanged by strangers, maybe meet someone’s idly wandering gaze and look away. Yes, I like trains.’ He opened his notebook and said no more.

  We had to run for the branch-line’s last service of the night, and then made our way perhaps ten miles in darkness, across fields, over stiles and fences and through black woods to the mouth of the combe. Corvin knew the way, of course, and I followed, panting and sweating as I tried to keep up.

  16

  At breakfast I asked M’Synder how the doctor was feeling, but she only smiled reassuringly and said, ‘I think I’ll let you go and see for yourself.’ In the lane I met Corvin pounding down from the house in his running shorts and a dress shirt with cuffs flapping open.

  ‘Doctor alright?’ I asked as he shot past.

  ‘Never better!’ he called over his shoulder, and was gone.

  On reaching the house I knocked at the open parlour door, and then peered cautiously round it to find the bed gone and the chairs back in their usual places.

  ‘Is that you, Mr Browne?’ called his voice from behind me, in a kind of mirrored déjà-entendu of his once calling me from the parlour. ‘I’m in the study. Please do come in.’ He was seated at his desk working as though nothing had happened. The dismembered hulk in the drive and the large, blank boards screwed across one side of the window were the only reminders of the storm.

  ‘Sorry I was such a miserable Casaubon last week,’ he said, brightly. ‘I’m feeling much better now.’

  ‘You can climb the stairs already?’ I asked.

  ‘Ah, no, I’m afraid I was right about stairs — neither of my corroded old knees seems to want to take that particular responsibility. I asked them nicely, but we came to something of a stand-off on the bottom step.’

  ‘But the bed’s gone,’ I observed.

  ‘Yes. I issued new instructions. I’ve settled myself into a different room.’ I looked around — there was no bed here.

  ‘The library?’ I guessed. He gave a short, dry laugh.

  ‘Oh dear, no — that would be rather antisocial, or perhaps hyper-social, and besides, I couldn’t possibly sleep under Hartley’s gaze.’ I knew what he meant — if my attention had wandered from the Spartan congresses, or the fire had been too warm and my eyelids had begun to hang heavy, it was always the luminous urgency of the portrait that re-engaged my mind’s machinery. ‘No,’ he went on, pointing over his shoulder, ‘the morning room is to be my bedroom now — you know, the one that’s been locked up.’ The mourning room. He looked at me steadily. ‘I don’t think Sam would want to be confined in there anymore.’ He went on looking, and gave a soft smile that did not seem pained at all. ‘I’ve tidied the place up a bit — let him out.’ I relaxed my practised silence and returned the smile.

  ‘I’m glad,’ I said, and he nodded, the wrinkles of his smiling eyes spreading across that face that was speckled brown like a sound autumn leaf.

  ‘What is more,’ he went on, slowly, ‘I have found something.’ His gaze dropped to a weird object encircled by his two hands on the desk — it was a magnifying glass in the shape of a giant, bulbous eye with brass lids. This he now began to slide with his fingertips by infinitesimal degrees across a piece of paper, so that swollen whorls of ink rose and fell inside the glass. We both leaned closer.

  ‘Furey’s letter,’ I said.

  ‘Indeed,’ he murmured, continuing his painstaking scrutiny. ‘There is some faint scoring on the last page, and the text of Uncle Prune’s thesaurus has leached a mottled sheen of ink onto the paper, making visible the depressions. I hope to take it to a friend in Oxford for closer examination. As you know, torn fragments of paper were found beside Furey’s body.’

  ‘What is it, then?’ I asked. ‘A last poem?’ He glanced up and smiled again. ‘Is it Dowley, or Furey?’

  ‘The good priest himself. Short but incontrovertibly genuine, unlike the other supposed “last poems” doing the rounds. Might boost the market value, eh? Would you like me to quote you a line?’

  April is the miracle month in England, and I suppose there is a kind of cruelty in miracles. No other month comes close — October’s work has the same bewildering swiftness, but dying is easy. The combe surprised me by its fine excesses wherever I turned. On a windless day the birds could taste as I did that mysterious promise of summer in the air, and oh, how they sang! Birdsong danced in through every window and onward through the ragged gaps in my soul, skipped and chattered and laughed along its derelict corridors, quickened it, bothered it, distracted and jumbled and drowned out its tentative repairs and left a smile of surrender on my face. An old blackbird (the oldest are the true masters) took possession of the cottage roof and poured mindless ecstasy into my waking, while wrens cheered me along the lane with piercing volleys of sound above the gentle, persistent prattling of the dunnocks with whom they shared the hedges.

  One such windless afternoon found me sitting in Corvin’s alcove in the now blossom-heavy orchard with a long, lazy kiss of sunlight on my eyelids, a sheaf of letter paper lying idle in one hand, a pen in the other, mesmerised by the drumming of a woodpecker in the nearby grove: a deep, shuddering, unworldly resonance, a drumming through the thin bark of the present, perhaps, into the tree rings of my own past, brief but coming again and again so that I could think of nothing else — could only wait for the next deliciously unenlightening burst, until the world shifted a little, the next delicious burst didn’t come and I opened my eyes.

  ‘It’s a pity you’ll never the see the gardens in their full glory, in high summer.’ So remarked Corvin later that same afternoon, as we walked together across the lawn. Now that the doctor and M’Synder seemed both to have accepted me as a settled inhabitant of the combe and made no mention of my departure, it was this young pretender, having held me here since his return, directed my steps, steered my very thoughts as once he had steered a mindless hulk of steel, who again exerted his will.

  ‘Yes, it’s a pity,’ I said casually, concealing a pang of resigned sorrow. Was it decided, after all? Did I not have a say?

  ‘You’ll just have to imagine it,’ he went on, waving his hand across the budding vista: ‘A foaming wave of delphinia in alien shades of blue; the intoxicating smell of a heap of wet grass roasting in the sun; Arnold in sandals, short trousers and a panama.’

  ‘Now that last item I can’t imagine,’ I said, laughing.r />
  ‘What about the ruddy-faced clown,’ he suggested quickly, ‘seated in the quiet, breezy shade of the treehouse with a laptop computer and a bottle of beer that he’s just retrieved from the cooling waters of the stream?’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Of course — alone, aloof, having a prospect of the distance only.’ A swift shadow fell across the garden as clouds rolled over the summit of Grey Man, and for a moment Corvin seemed to lose his enviable repose, to shift awkwardly, self-consciously as he squinted at the sky. I was almost reminded of myself. ‘Only his doubts attend,’ he muttered.

  Rose went back to school at the end of this, my fifteenth week. Thanks to the blackbird I did not sleep through her departure this time, but joined her for a last coffee in M’Synder’s parlour while she waited for the car.

  ‘Good luck with your exams,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Browne.’ She folded a white shirt-collar down over her pinstripe jacket and smoothed it with quick fingers.

  ‘Won’t you call me Sam, just once?’ She looked back at me with her steady child’s gaze, gently pulled outwards at one corner by the scar.

  ‘Alright. Sam. I’ve drawn a picture for you — a memento.’ I certainly blushed, but didn’t seem to care anymore: I wouldn’t see her again.

  ‘You shouldn’t have, really —’

  ‘It didn’t quite come off, I’m afraid,’ she said, turning to M’Synder’s letter-rack, drawing out a small paper and laying it before me on the table. It was a meticulous ink drawing of the view from the little landing window — there was the stream in its thistly meadow, the lane from which Corvin had once raised a gloved hand, the lamp hanging over the steep-sided porch, the bent hawthorn from which the robin had first performed his quiet serenade —

  ‘What bird is that?’ I asked, in a level voice.

  ‘It’s a jay,’ she replied, cheerfully. Oh, why spoil it with a jay? I thought. Why? ‘A big, colourful thing,’ she went on. ‘It landed there in the hawthorn while I was drawing and stayed for ages, bobbing its head and looking up at me. It wanted to be in the picture, I think.’

  ‘Well, thank you very much,’ I said, looking up into those sharp green eyes for one, two heartbeats before the soft clatter of a car summoned her to the door. ‘It will mean a lot to me.’

  17

  One morning I crossed the bridge to find an intrepid van parked in the drive. The portly stonemason stood nearby talking to Meaulnes while the doctor looked on from his wheelchair. They were evidently concluding their discussions about the repairs, and now as I watched the mason lifted a heavy parcel from the van and handed it to the giant gardener, who hefted it up under one arm and loped away to his yard.

  ‘What are you working on?’ asked the doctor shortly afterwards, as he crutched himself steadily towards me down the long green carpet of the library. The soft thud and creak reminded me of voiceless, one-legged Harry in The Croked Hand. The borrowed man’s credit was still good, by the way — his would not be the first to run out, after all.

  ‘Gibbon.’ I was nearing the end of the eleventh volume.

  ‘Balls to Gibbon!’ he snapped, making me jump. This was, I thought, an unfortunate phrase to aim at the poor historian, who had medical troubles in that region. ‘I have a name to breathe some life back into you,’ he continued, standing over me with the crutches as though he might prod me with one. ‘Shakespeare. A most reliable guide to history. And have another for no extra charge: Dostoevsky!’ I told him I had read Crime and Punishment at school. ‘Then this week you will read Hamlet and The Brothers Karamazov,’ he shot back. ‘Both are compulsory texts at Combe College.’

  Parallelograms of afternoon sunlight draped themselves over us while a gentle breeze wafted from a single open pane. The doctor lowered himself carefully into a chair and laid down the crutches, and we had the last of those talks he had promised on my first morning at the combe.

  ‘Perhaps you think this conflict between reason and superstition a touch outdated?’ he suggested as we again discussed the inherited creed. ‘‘‘Hartley and his Enlightenment pals raised the standard,” you might say, “and the other side died a slow death: reason won.” Well, it is true that superstition and religious dogma (I choose my words carefully) have been relegated to the level of eccentricities — to which, incidentally, all men are surely entitled. Why, I know a well-intentioned retired GP who is obsessed with one composer to the exclusion of all others, even parades him around inside his own name! Ridiculous! But to return to the point, what use have the victors made of their conquest? You agree, I hope, that a daily grind of materialism sprinkled with sentimentality is not enough.’

  ‘Yes, I agree.’

  ‘For me — for us — truth is the sole, simple absolute. All the other so-called virtues and vices are mere cartoons of human behaviour — change your point of observation, look at them side-on, and they change shape or disappear. And I don’t mean some mystical conception of truth, of course — just the plain truth. Like —’ he seemed to cast about for an example, then fixed his eye on me. ‘Did you ever cheat on your wife?’ I bristled, but the answer was easy.

  ‘No.’ His rejoinder was swift.

  ‘Did you ever have the opportunity to do so?’ He held my gaze as I flickered a cursory torch-beam back into memory and glimpsed again those cosy Friday nights at home.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Truth begets truth, you see? Doesn’t it feel good?’ It didn’t.

  I plunged into Karamazov as instructed, and was still riding it like a magnificent, foaming wave when Juliet arrived unexpectedly, on Friday. My eyes were drawn away for a moment from the spell of the narrative and followed her as she came to stand at the library window, half-turned away from me and towards the white, bright, cloudy afternoon sky, cradling the favourite coffee mug, one knee drawn forward to rest on the sill, the heel lifted. I wish I could have drawn her then. Sometimes my whole life seems to be a diary of such wishes. Where do they come from, and what are they for?

  ‘I was just telling Arnold and Corvin about my coming to a new understanding with a teacher-friend at the school,’ she said, blowing gently into the mug. ‘I’m afraid they were rather shocked. But Arnold was the one preaching about paths not yet passed by — do you remember?’ I nodded. ‘Well, I liked the look of this path, so I’ve taken it. The rest remains to be seen.’ I hesitated for a few seconds, letting the adjustment settle before replying.

  ‘I’m really glad to hear it,’ I said, remembering that horrible moment in the garden when a raw January wind was blowing hair across her face. ‘I hope he’ll make you happy.’

  ‘He’s a divorcee, of course,’ she said, ‘but I suppose we all make mistakes.’

  On Saturday the air was warm. Corvin and Meaulnes were busy in the glasshouse all morning, while the doctor, Juliet and I sat at a round table on the corner of the terrace reading and talking. The doctor rambled away happily about the past — he explained, for instance, that his father had been a pioneer of crampons on Scottish mountains before the war, when the British climbing establishment considered them instruments of Satan. ‘He used to call them his pins and needles,’ he told us fondly, ‘because that’s what you got from the tight leather binding. When he was cut dead by the president of the SMC at its annual dinner he called after him cheerfully, “And I thought you only cut steps!” Ah, he was proud of that. Now everyone wears them, of course.’

  Later he hobbled inside to rest. Corvin appeared with a tray of gardening tools and sat cross-legged in the sun sharpening them, humming to the rhythm of the whetstone while Meaulnes watered the ranks of budding tulips along the side of the lawn.

  ‘What is that tune?’ I asked suddenly. ‘I keep hearing it.’ Corvin’s slender brows dropped into a playful frown.

  ‘That? I think I picked it up from Meaulnes. Old chap,’ he called, twisting round, ‘what’s that tune you’re always warbling at?’ The gardener bunched his lips and gave a rendition for us on the spot, in a delica
te, trilling tone of which even the old blackbird might have been proud.

  ‘That one?’ he said. ‘It came from mon père. He used to sing, you remember, but I cannot. L’amour est mort — these were the words, I think.’ Corvin’s frown deepened.

  ‘My love is dead,’ said Juliet to her open book, and we all turned to her. ‘Gone to his death bed, all under the sallow tree.’ She looked up and gave a sad little smile, then got up without another word and wandered away across the lawn.

  ‘What is that?’ I had heard it, or read it, before.

  ‘It’s the refrain from Furey’s famous roundelay,’ murmured Corvin, thoughtfully. ‘Arnold once told me that Sarah Louise had set it to music, and sung it at Hartley’s funeral, but the tune was lost. You don’t think — where did your father get that song, old chap?’

  Meaulnes shrugged. ‘Not from France, I think. Maybe from the old caretaker of Madame Stella? Who knows?’ He returned to his watering, whistling softly.

  ‘What is a roundelay anyway?’ I asked.

  ‘Just a song with a repeated refrain,’ said Corvin. ‘I rather fancy it represents the interplay between life and literature’ — then his hazel-brown eyes lit up — ‘but is life the verse, and literature the repeating refrain, or is it the other way round?’ I thought for a moment.

  ‘I suppose that depends on whether you believe more in the possibilities of life or those of literature in making sense of it.’

  ‘Exactly! Men of action and men of words. Isn’t it grand? A motif for a book, surely, or part of a book.’ He looked around for Juliet, and then saw her sitting motionless on a bench in the cedar’s dark shadow. ‘L’amour est mort, indeed,’ he murmured. ‘Love is dead — a characteristically elegant mistranslation by a Frenchman. But love, it seems, is not dead after all.’